CAPACITIES AND PROBABILISTIC BELIEFS: A PRECARIOUS COEXISTENCE

This paper raises the problem of how to define revealed probabilistic beliefs in the context of the capacity/Choquet Expected Utility model. At the center of the analysis is a decision-theoretically axiomatized definition of ""revealed unambiguous events."" The definition is shown to impose surprisingly strong restrictions on the underlying capacity and on the set of unambiguous events; in particular, the latter is always an algebra. Alternative weaker definitions violate even minimal criteria of adequacy. Rather than finding fault with the proposed definition, we argue that our results indicate that the CEU model is epistemically restrictive, and point out that analogous problems do not arise within the Maximin Expected Utility model.

Scaling Up Local Development Initiatives: Brazil's Food Acquisition Programme

__Abstract__ Global poverty largely remains a rural phenomenon. Close to 70 per cent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty inhabit rural areas (IFAD, 2011). Further, agriculture is found to be a source of livelihood for over 80 per cent of rural people, highlighting the importance of supporting this activity as a means to fight poverty (World Bank, 2007; IFAD, 2011). This is darkly ironic: rural areas are where most of the world’s food is produced and also where the majority of the world’s extreme poor and malnourished reside. Poverty in rural areas stems from a diverse set of shortcomings such as: lack of adequate public investments in infrastructure, storage and market facilities coupled with disadvantages rooted in historical inequities, agricultural, land tenure and credit policies and economic factors that have a bearing on the distribution of assets, productive resources and access to credit and markets. Rural livelihoods are also based on a wide range of activities ranging from agricultural production to off-farm wage labour, and these vary across agro-climatic zones, land tenure arrangements, regions and cultures. The growing frequency of extreme weather events and recent increases in global financial and commodity price volatility—with sharp price rises particularly since 2006 (FAO et. al., 2011: 8)—have heightened the obstacles that rural producers, particularly poor, already face in many regions and have also contributed to severe localised food insecurity

The 'State' of Food Sovereignty in Latin America: Political Projects and Alternative Pathways in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia

__abstract__ The concept of food sovereignty has been enshrined in a number of countries’ Constitutions around the world without any clear consensus around what state-sponsored ‘food sovereignty’ initiatives might entail given the complexity and interconnectedness of the global food system. In the vanguard of this movement at the national level has been the so-called ‘pink tide’ of Latin America – namely Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. As a constitutional right, food sovereignty presents a significant opening to promote a citizen’s revolution of the food system, but is such a proposal possible or desirable as a top-down initiative? The concept itself is inherently peopleled as it implies constructing (or deconstructing) a food system that is defined, led, controlled, and accessed in a culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable way by local people in a given territory. At the same time, state intervention is a necessary function to confront the global food system, dismantle unequal agrarian structures, and recognize the autonomy of people and communities in defining and controlling their food and agricultural systems. In different geographies and societies of food sovereignty, it is necessary to evaluate how state and social actors interact in the pursuit of a national food sovereignty strategy, with particular attention to the relations of control and access to decision-making and physical resources

The Iliad’s big swoon: a case of innovation within the epic tradition

In book 5 of the Iliad Sarpedon suffers so greatly from a wound that his ‘‘ψυχή leaves him’. Rather than dying, however, Sarpedon lives to fight another day. This paper investigates the phrase τὸν δὲ λίπε ψυχή in extant archaic Greek poetry to gain a sense of its traditional referentiality and better assess the meaning of Sarpedon’s swoon. Finding that all other instances of the ψυχή leaving the body signify death, it suggests that the Iliad exploits a traditional unit of utterance to flag up the importance of Sarpedon to this version of the Troy story

Queering the grammar school boy: class, sexuality and authenticity in the works of Colin MacInnes and Ray Gosling

In 1959 Colin MacInnes published the fourth in his series of social issue novels, Absolute Beginners. In it the unnamed protagonist is constructed as the iconic teenager, slick, cool, creative, with his ex-lover Crépe Suzette as the object of his art and as his Achilles heel. The novel is framed over one summer, against a backdrop of racial tension, which ultimately led the Boy towards adulthood. MacInnes’s protagonist has been dismissed as an emblem rather than a character, and MacInnes himself derided by George Melly as a perpetual teenager. However in this chapter, we will suggest that taken as a whole MacInnes’ work constructs a complex understanding of The Boy’s political possibilities intersecting with sexuality, gender, race and class. By integrating his novelistic work with his journalistic and activist writing, we will demonstrate the complexity of MacInnes’ Boy as an autonomous, queer political agent, embodied in the ultimate Boy; Ray Gosling. Gosling’s own writing becomes a lens through which to root historical understanding of teenagers and teenage cultures as sexual and racial constructs

Orientational transitions in a nematic confined by competing surfaces

The effect of confinement on the orientational structure of a nematic liquid crystal model has been investigated by using a version of density-functional theory (DFT). We have focused on the case of a nematic confined by opposing flat surfaces, in slab geometry (slit pore), which favor planar molecular alignment (parallel to the surface) and homeotropic alignment (perpendicular to the surface), respectively. The spatial dependence of the tilt angle of the director with respect to the surface normal has been studied, as well as the tensorial order parameter describing the molecular order around the director. For a pore of given width, we find that, for weak surface fields, the alignment of the nematic director is perpendicular to the surface in a region next to the surface favoring homeotropic alignment, and parallel along the rest of the pore, with a interface separating these regions (S phase). For strong surface fields, the director is distorted uniformly, the tilt angle exhibiting a linear dependence with the distance normal to the surface (L phase). Our calculations reveal the existence of a first-order transition between the two director configurations, which is driven by changes in the surface field strength, and also by changes in the pore width. In the latter case the transition occurs, for a given surface field, between the S phase for narrow pores and the L phase for wider pores. A link between the L-S transition and the anchoring transition observed for the semi-infinite case is proposed. We also provide calculations with a phenomenological approach that yields the same main result that DFT in the scale length where this is valid.Comment: submitted to PR

Topological Defects and Interactions in Nematic Emulsions

Inverse nematic emulsions in which surfactant-coated water droplets are dispersed in a nematic host fluid have distinctive properties that set them apart from dispersions of two isotropic fluids or of nematic droplets in an isotropic fluid. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of the distortions produced in the nematic host by the dispersed droplets and of solvent mediated dipolar interactions between droplets that lead to their experimentally observed chaining. A single droplet in a nematic host acts like a macroscopic hedgehog defect. Global boundary conditions force the nucleation of compensating topological defects in the nematic host. Using variational techniques, we show that in the lowest energy configuration, a single water droplet draws a single hedgehog out of the nematic host to form a tightly bound dipole. Configurations in which the water droplet is encircled by a disclination ring have higher energy. The droplet-dipole induces distortions in the nematic host that lead to an effective dipole-dipole interaction between droplets and hence to chaining.Comment: 17 double column pages prepared by RevTex, 15 eps figures included in text, 2 gif figures for Fig. 1